A shadowy group calling itself Occupy Brooklyn is set to rally in Grand Army Plaza on Saturday — the first big protest in Brooklyn — and unlike many mainstream Democrats and Mayor Bloomberg, Borough President Markowitz is offering some support.

“It was only a matter of time before the . . . rallies made their way to Brooklyn,” Markowitz told us. “There is no doubt that Americans — those in the ‘99 percent’ — are hurting, and we can all agree that some of the issues being raised by these protests . . . are concerns we can all rally around.”

A local Brooklyn Latino organization wants to help long-time residents take back the community before hipsters and their trendy bars and overpriced clothing stores wipe out the area’s Latino culture for good.

“When you wake up one morning and you see the corner bodega is now replaced by a fancy cafe or restaurant and you see your neighbors being pushed out because they can no longer afford the rent, all of a sudden you’ve lost your friends,” said [the] head of El Puente. “You begin to wonder, ‘Am I next?'”

El Puente (The Bridge) has landed more than $2.8 million in federal, city and private grant money for its Green Light District project to send swarms of volunteers door-to-door in the next 10 years to help Latino residents get healthier, more educated and more cultured.

Brooklyn, fiercely proud of its independence from Manhattan, is an expanding frontier for the Do It Yourself movement — resourceful residents are baking bread, raising chickens for eggs, keeping bees for honey or simply renovating brownstones themselves.

Lance is not a hillbilly. He’s a quiet-natured young professor at a local college. Rousseau, Diderot, Hume, and Kant inhabit his bookshelves. Predictably, he’s erudite on even the topic of moonshine, explaining that Brooklyn hooch differs from that produced in, say, Tennessee because the mineral content of the water used for distilling alters the spirit’s flavor.

Lance isn’t the only local expert. New York City moonshiners are giving the spirit a new identity. Today’s urban moonshiners are sophisticated. But some of their palaver still has that country flavor. Take Tim. He describes his moonshine as “slightly sweet” with a “vanilla nose” and “a light taste of corn.” His final verdict is as country as cornpone: “It’s pretty smooth going down, but then you get a sunburn from the inside out.”

They get chauffeured to the office, hobnob at community barbecues, attend ribbon cuttings and concerts, and — in the case of Brooklyn Beep Marty Markowitz yesterday — attend canine weddings.

Markowitz was actually supposed to officiate the nuptials of Jack, a puggle mix, and Penny, a miniature poodle, at a benefit for the Brooklyn Animal Foster Network in Prospect Park. But when he sniffed the media was around and might mock yet another of his pointless public appearances, he fled like a frightened poodle.

A build Williamsburg’s largest waterfront park has stalled — perhaps permanently — because the city doesn’t have the cash to buy the land.

City officials dropped a bombshell on community leaders last Thursday, revealing that they had no money and no timetable to buy several private properties off Kent Avenue and N. 11th Street surrounding the 28-acre Bushwick Inlet site.

Infuriated community leaders accused Mayor Bloomberg of revoking the city’s long-standing agreement to build parks at the edge of the East River in exchange for rezoning most of the waterfront for luxury high-rises in 2005.

Mickey Rooney’s buck-toothed Asian character Breakfast at Tiffany’s is one of the most embarrassing things about the 1960s. Good riddance. Or not:

” ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is a beloved movie, with one irredeemable, superfluous scene from an era in Hollywood when more overt racism was acceptable in movies than it is today,” a [Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy] spokeswoman wrote.

Nancy Webster, executive director of the conservancy, said that she hopes to address people’s concerns, but hasn’t decided how just yet.

“We appreciate hearing people’s views about our programming, whether they are critical or supportive,” she said. “We trust our audience to use their own judgment about what is appropriate for their families.”

Or they could scrap it and screen a bunch of old Jerry Lewis shows . . .

Cops are slapping cyclists with nearly double the number of traffic tickets per month in the wake of a “crackdown” on rogue bikers in Brooklyn.

Officers wrote at least 695 bicycle summonses in the borough during the month of February — compared to just 375 in the same period last year — with cops citing “pedestrian safety” as the impetus for the booming ticket blitz.

. . .

Early in the ticket blitz, for example, one man got three tickets from a single incident on Union Avenue near S. Third Street in Williamsburg: One for riding on the sidewalk, another for riding against traffic — and the last for mouthing off to the officer who stopped him in the first place.

Supposedly tried-and-true tactics for avoiding jury duty — claiming you’re racist and that you never trust the cops, for example — can sometimes backfire, leading to even more jury duty, as well as public scorn in the Post:

An incensed federal judge sentenced a racist Brooklyn woman to indefinite jury duty on Tuesday after she trashed the NYPD and minorities.

“This is an outrage, and so are you!” Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis told the woman, holding up her bile-filled juror questionnaire.

. . .

It is not unheard of for people to try to get out of jury service by making ridiculous statements concerning their views.

It was unclear Tuesday whether that was this woman’s motive.

And if it was, it didn’t work.

Indeed, the woman was going to be seeing a lot of Brooklyn Federal Court.

“She’s coming back [today], Thursday and Friday — and until the future, when I am ready to dismiss her,” Garaufis said.

In an SEC filing, Atlantic Yards developers admit that the big project that will reshape downtown Brooklyn may never pan out, meaning that all the project would amount to would be one lousy arena — no low-income housing, no Miss Brooklyn tower and little economic benefit, because sports arenas don’t easily recoup a $300 million public investment:

Documents filed last week with the Securities and Exchange Commission by developer Bruce Ratner and his Forest City Enterprises warn that the non-arena portions of the plan could experience “further delays” leading to most or all of the rest of the 22-acre, $4.9 million project being scrapped.

In an unusual arrangement, the ebullient beep has placed his three drivers on staggered, 16-hour shifts so someone will always be available to wheel him around town between 8 a.m. and midnight, seven days a week.

. . .

Taxpayers pick up the tab of $177,372 a year, not including overtime.

It’s all within the city’s lax rules, since the Conflicts of Interest Board has decided that elected officials with government vehicles can do just about anything they want with them.

One late-night stint last month took Markowitz and driver Robert Macko to the Blue Water Grill in Union Square during Restaurant Week.

The film, which won the award for Best New York Narrative at the Tribeca Film Festival 2010, portrays New York City’s largest borough as a land where aimless thirtysomethings move to avoid adulthood.

“The idea was to make a narrative film that felt like a documentary about the demise of a Brooklyn couple,” says the 37-year-old [director Dana Adam] Shapiro, who was nominated for an Academy Award for the documentary “Murderball.” “The male character rides his bike everywhere — which is a very Brooklyn thing to do — and finds being stationary scary. He doesn’t want to settle down, and I think a lot of people will relate to that.”

The shuttered St. Anthony of Padua school on Leonard Street — whose “No parking–school zone” signs are still in affect and snaring drivers even though the school has been closed for five years — will re-open this year, meaning that soon the parking tickets will at least be legit.

And this week, Forest City Ratner confirmed that it was considering erecting a 34-story prefabricated, or modular, tower, as a way of cutting its construction costs and fulfilling its obligation to start building housing.

The construction unions that Mr. Ratner had lauded last year for sticking with him were stunned by the suggestion that much of the work might take place in a factory, where wages are much lower than on-site. Forest City has put off the start date for the tower, the first of 16, until the end of the year.

Connect the dots, and this becomes a much more significant story than the future of one bike lane in Brooklyn, or even the career of one official. New York City justly sees itself as the world’s greatest city: here, in some sense, people live the way everyone would live if they had the chance. How New York — the city that still has a uniquely low level of car ownership and use — manages its transport planning in the 21st century matters for the whole world: it is the template. If cycling is pushed back into the margins of that future, rather than promoted, along with efficient mass public transit and safe, pleasant pedestrianism, as a key part of that future, the consequences will be grave and grim.

He told [the Brooklyn Paper] that his notion is to annex the “underused” western portion of [Carroll Park] near Court Street for the piazza, setting up tables, chairs and awnings — a cosmopolitan space where area cafés could serve drinks and food.

. . .

Andersen, the former architecture and design critic for Time magazine and a co-founder of Spy magazine, conceded that basketball players could be displaced by his plan, but ballers would have a readily available option nearby, as PS 58 at Smith and First Place has outdoor courts.

. . .

“Certainly, this connects to the ethnic heritage of the neighborhood of the last century,” he said. “But to me, this is for everyone in the neighborhood,” he said.

One corner of the Duane Reade store on Bedford Avenue in the Williamsburg neighborhood has Fire Island Lighthouse Ale and eight other beers on tap, with growlers — refillable glass bottles — lining the walls. Uniformed clerks-cum-beer-experts fill the growlers and conduct tastings only — sorry, no pints served. Behind a bar, a large walk-in refrigerator stocks common national brands as well as local, craft and imported beers. “We knew we would have a little bit of a battle to try to bring Duane Reade into this community, because they really don’t like a chain store,” said Paul Tiberio, senior vice president for merchandising and marketing at the company.

The Williamsburg beer bar is part of a larger effort by Duane Reade to recognize — and capitalize — on the fierce identity and local needs of many New York City neighborhoods.

“There are a lot of young professionals in Brooklyn, and those are the main people you see at a trivia night — people with a lot of education who still like to go out and have drinks,” [a participant] said, laughing.